Where pop culture and the social sciences COLLIDE! A satirical(?) blog analyzing mass media trends and a place to get all psychosocial about consumerism...even if you DON'T think the Internet is a principality of the US.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Pac-Man Adhesive Bandages!

The most fun you’ll have with paper cuts, ever!

You’ve probably heard that human beings are driven by certain inherent instincts before. No matter where one lives -- nor his or her race, gender, sexual identity, hair color, or ability to/inability to juggle -- a brief set of urges and desires seem to motivate all of us as peoples. Hunger is probably the foremost driver, with sex being the second; and if you’re really creative (and don’t mind getting morsels of food lodged in some rather unsavory canals), you can probably knock those two off at the same time.

A lot of people, however, have hypothesized that some our instinctual drives aren’t desires, but fears; chief among them, the desire to not have pain inflicted upon us. It’s a solid theorem to be sure, but I recently stumbled across a certain item that completely shoots that little idea to shit.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…Pac-Man adhesive bandages!

Now, most of us would normally elect to avoid nicks, scrapes, tears and the occasional scratch, but when the end dividend of a minor slicing or stabbing involves getting an opportunity to tape a beloved video game icon to your flesh, I think one’s only rational course of action is to go out of his or her way to incur minor household injuries. As painful as a paper cut may be, I don’t think that temporary sting is greater than or equal to the sheer awesomeness of looking down at a strip of Pac-Man wrapped around your finger, and you know that as a fact.

You’d have to be a pretty cunning linguist to find a way to write a descriptive and/or interesting paragraph about the little paper sachets that adhesive bandages come in, so I’ll just skip trying and move right along. The funny thing is, since the little paper containers are a little opaque, it’s kinda’ hard to necessarily tell that there is a Pac-Man print on the bandages within. I imagine, somewhere, some careless mother dumped a box into one of those first aid plastic boxes that seemingly every suburban family in America is required by law to own, and like, five months later, one of her kids gets a scratch, asks for a bandage, and has his or her mind blown by the fact that instead of wrapping a brown, sticky thing around their thumb, they get to bleed all over Pac-Man instead.

But back to our bandages, no? As you can see here, you get three different printed strips to monkey around with. They’re all really colorful, and I like how the design patterns fluctuate. It would have been so easy to just make two or three different variations of the same pictograph, but the guys at Boston Corp. went that extra mile and made each individual bandage look totally distinct and awesome.

Of the three patterns, I think the black and blue one -- the one that mimics the classic background from the original arcade game -- is definitely my favorite. The yellow strip is pretty cool, too, and I like the pixelated (not to be confused with pixilated, of course) ghosts on the light blue one. The only problem here, of course, is finding a way to get scrapped up three times over the course of an afternoon so you can access the whole trio.

Is there anything else that can possibly be said about these things? Unfortunately, I only believe that it’s possible to write 500 or so words about bandages before you run out of proper adjectives. If this thing were a food item, I could at least extend the column a bit by talking about how it tastes, but due to the mono-purpose nature of the bandages, I’m just kinda’ stuck writing about how it looks. Hell, even if I wanted to bring my other senses into the equation, it’s not like I would have that much to go on. I mean, really, has anybody in history ever asked what a Band-Aid sounded like before?

Alas, they are out there, and they’re pretty cheap (if you pay more than a dollar, you’re getting gypped, and big time.) And as an added bonus? These things make excellent stickers -- needless to say, there were more than a few notebooks around my place that got the Inky, Blinky and Clyde treatment later on in the evening…

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Your Friendly Neighborhood Jimbo...

Greetings, Intraweb travelers! My name is Jimbo X (an unusual surname, I know...I think it's Greenlandic) and I'm your kindly proprietor of IIIA. You're probably wondering what the intent of this site is, so that makes two of us. I suppose it's an info-dump for all of the stuff that I find fascinating/irksome about American culture and society, so you'll find a nice jumble of high culture snobbery and low culture sleaze here. It's also a place for me to rant, rave and ramble about all sorts of things that matter and don't matter, so prepare yourself for some heavy-handed bloviating about politics and consumption. Well, that, and lots of stuff about video games and junk food. The things that matter the most obviously.